Evil Ish?

Heaven’s worst janitor. Hell’s worst demon. One very confused serial killer.

Ishmael has been mopping the corridors of Heaven for millions of years. He’s content. He’s good at it. He asks for nothing except a clean floor and maybe a quiet moment to watch the Morning Star rehearse with the choir.

Then he misses a spot of polish.

One slippery floor, one closed door, and one very wrong place at a very wrong time later, Ishmael finds himself falling — not because he rebelled, not because he sinned, but because he was in the way.

Now he’s in Hell. He’s not evil. He’s not powerful. He’s just... there.

For sixty million years, Ishmael has been the worst demon in Hell — accidentally cheering up the souls he was supposed to torture, improving the ventilation on levels specifically designed to have bad ventilation, and floating helplessly back toward the top of a hierarchy where advancement means going down. His supervisor, Gregorian, despises him. The legendary possessor, Gerald, rates him professionally. And Lucifer himself — for reasons nobody can explain — thinks he’s fascinating.

When Ishmael is given one last chance to prove himself with a simple possession, he does what he does best.
He gets it catastrophically wrong.

Instead of inhabiting a lonely librarian named Margaret Cole, he ends up inside the other Margaret Cole — a beloved third-grade teacher with twenty-three devoted students, a shelf full of carefully tended plants, and a kill room.

Margaret Cole is the most compassionate person Ishmael has ever encountered. She is also something that doesn’t have a file in the Bureau of Possessions. And when she figures out that she has a demon living in her head, she doesn’t panic.

She asks him to levitate the furniture.

Evil Ish? is a cosmic comedy about the worst demon in Hell, the most complicated human he’s ever met, and what happens when a being hardwired for grace ends up somewhere that has no protocol for it.

It is also, quietly, a story about grey areas. About the systems that fail us and the anger that fills the space they leave. About what forgiveness actually means when it isn’t a transaction. About the difference between the place you were assigned and the place you were always supposed to be.

And about a mop. A very important mop.

For fans of Terry Pratchett, The Good Place, and anyone who has ever ended up in exactly the wrong place at exactly the right time.